Ethnographic Upscaling: Exploring and Testing Hypotheses Drawn from In-depth Ethnographic Findings in Spatially Continuous Cases

Abstract

This article introduces ethnographic upscaling, an innovative procedure to explore and test hypotheses drawn from in-depth ethnographic findings in spatially continuous cases. The approach combines the strength of localized ethnographic descriptions with questionnaire-based regional surveys to study the distribution of ethnographic findings across social groups by comparison. The approach was designed in the Local Institutions in Globalized Societies project. This anthropological long-term research project ran from 2010 to 2019 to explore institutional regimes for managing water in arid Namibia. The article describes how the ethnographic upscaling approach was developed and implemented, discusses some exemplary results, and offers a critical reflection on its shortcomings and potentials.

Metatheme Analysis: A Qualitative Method for Cross-Cultural Research

“…Despite this burgeoning renaissance, methodological research on cross-cultural ethnography has exploded only in the last 5 years. The recent work has focused on how to: conduct local and regional case comparisons (Schnegg & Lowe, 2020), scale-up ethnographic findings (Bollig et al, 2020), develop shared questions and data collection procedures across ethnographic fieldsites (Hirsch et al, 2020), examine phenomena that are inherently multi-sited (Falzon, 2016), and apply findings to inform public policy (Pacheco-Vega, 2020). A major challenge to emerge from this work is how to bridge locally-grounded and broader-scale findings (Lowe & Schnegg, 2020, p. 16), a challenge that can be addressed using metatheme analysis.…”

“…In recent years, there has been a florescence of cross-cultural research using ethnographic data. This cutting-edge work confronts a range of significant methodological challenges in undertaking cross-cultural ethnography (Bollig et al, 2020;Falzon, 2016;Hirsch et al, 2020;Pacheco-Vega, 2020;. While this new methodological scholarship is rapidly and significantly advancing our understanding of how to conduct qualitative cross-cultural research, it currently provides very little guidance on how to do thematic analysis cross-culturally.…”

Hitting the target and missing the point? On the risks of measuring women’s empowerment in agricultural development

“…This will enable the establishment of indicators that are contextually legitimate, the broader patterns of which can then be established through large-N surveys that use the validated measurements (Khadka and Vacik 2012). There are a few, rare applications of this approach to indicator development (Nazarea et al 1998;Bollig et al 2020), though they remain exceptions. For example, borrowing from the field of clinical psychology, Nazarea et al (1998) used a modified Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to generate culturally relevant indicators of sustainability and quality of life amongst indigenous communities in the Philippines.…”